Burial ground, Moneyveen, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Burial Grounds
Inside a ringfort on the Galway countryside, there is something that looks, at first glance, like a small fortified castle.
It has a circular curtain wall roughly thirty-two metres across and three metres high, stepped crenellations along the top, and cross-shaped arrow loops punched through the merlons. There is an ornamental entrance on the north side. At the centre stands a circular tower about ten metres wide and fifteen metres tall, its own walls finished with a string course and a further run of crenellations. An arched doorway leads into a roofless interior containing a vault and a scattering of graveslabs. None of this is medieval. It is a private burial enclosure, built in deliberate imitation of military architecture, and it sits inside an earthwork that is genuinely ancient.
The structure was associated with the Trench family of Woodlawn House, and early Ordnance Survey mapping labels it simply as "Trench's monument." By the third edition of the six-inch OS map, published in 1933, it was recorded more plainly as a burial ground. The ringfort it occupies, a roughly circular earthen enclosure of the kind commonly built across Ireland in the early medieval period, would have been centuries old before anyone in the Trench family thought to use the site for interment. The family apparently continued to do so until quite recently: the last burial here took place in 1979. The combination of a pre-Norman earthwork, a Gothic Revival-style funerary monument, and a history that runs into living memory gives the place an unusual layering that is difficult to categorise neatly as any single thing.